The Rake Magazine

Tag: Gomes

  • Wolves 2007-08 Season Recap, Part 1

    Note: I know I said I’d have a Wolves recap for you Monday, but with all the playoff ball consuming my time (not to mention other writing projects–my editors know what they are) I now realize I’m never going to get this done unless I break it into parts.

    So, here’s Part 1, which deals with what I wanted to hear from Kevin McHale at his season-ending press conference last week. (Please bear with the changes in typeface that may crop up because I cut and pasted some of the press conference transcription.) At least one other part will be an evaluation of each player on the roster: Both how I regard him and how I believe the Wolves’ front office regards him. Anyway, thanks for your patience. I’m also willing to kick around the playoffs, if anybody is interested, and will probably in the next couple of days set up an open thread with a bevy of impressions to get things rolling and see what happens. 

    When Timberwolves personnel veep Kevin McHale did his by-now traditional meeting with the media the day after the 2007-08 season to discuss the State of the Ballclub, his mood was decidedly more upbeat and the number of reporters he was addressing was much smaller than in recent years past. Part of the reason (for both) was that there was no buzz McHale was going to step down. The other part (again, for both) was that the bar of expectations had been set so low, especially for the immediate past and future of this ballclub.

    McHale sought to change that some with his dramatic proclamation that, barring significant injuries, the 2008-09 Wolves should improve by some 20 games, flirting with .500, if not a bottom-rung playoff spot in the ultra-competitive Western Conference. And how was this going to occur? Essentially by standing pat and letting the existing personnel get more familiar with each other.

    McHale said this two or three different ways, but just to be clear, I asked him, "Beyond the seasoning of existing personnel, what does this team need?" This is what he said:

    "It needs to come together and play. Everybody says ‘We’ve got to go and get somebody from the outside,’ [but] those guys have got to go in there and grow together as a team, establish themselves a little bit—Al has established himself—kind of, underneath that how are we going to play, our style of play, becomes more dedicated defensively in getting back; our transition defense needs a big step up. Defensively we have got to get tougher. So most of the growth I see is internally. Now in the draft we’ll get a good player in the draft, but with way it is set up we’ll get a 19, 20, 21 year old kid; if you are hanging your hopes on that coming into a man’s league….I would say that, overall, I would just say basically a little more shooting around Al, because he is going to get double-teamed and you have got to have court-spacers. But I thought Foye, when you had Foye and used Foye to enter the ball on the strong side and when you left him he made shots; that is a big part of it. Because I think Bassy was out trying [to distribute], not shooting a lot. Again I think shooting. But to me the biggest jump we are going to make is that group in there staying together and being confident."

    Asked point blank what *besides* seasoning is needed, McHale repeatedly invoked seasoning.

    There are two fundamental problems with this. Minnesota does not have a legitimate NBA center on its current roster capable of starting for a playoff contender. The other fundamental problem is that the Wolves have a glut of swingmen. You could argue–I do argue–that unless Randy Foye dramatically improves his court vision and attitude and Corey Brewer dramatic improves his strength and sinew, the team’s last three top draft picks are all best suited to play the off-guard position. And yet McHale specifically cites the two aspects of the game in which off-guards are thought to be most adept–transition defense and outside shooting–as the two largest areas where this ballclub needs to improve. 

    I understand where McHale is coming from. He’s not going to say this team needs a hardy, defensive oriented big man, because unless he’s going to reach for a player based on position more than talent in the draft, or overpay in free agency, there doesn’t look to be any way to address that weakness. By contrast, talking about the need for shooting and transition defense sets the to-do agenda for his swingman glut heading into next season. I’d have more sympathy for his hands being tied if he wasn’t the one spooling out the rope.

     

    But make no mistake: Minnesota will never be a viable playoff contender without a staunch big men to take the defensive pressure off the team’s two best players, Al Jefferson and Ryan Gomes. A steady diet of postseason games has reminded me what it takes to be an elite NBA team: A bonafide superstar, a demi-star, knowledgeable role players, and capable team defense. It is possible–not quite probable–that Jefferson is a budding superstar. Gomes is certainly a knowledgeable role player who can find a niche on most any ballclub. But put them on the court together at center and power forward and you cannot defend in a playoff-worthy manner.

     

    The numbers at 82games.com show that the Wolves allow a whopping 12.1 points per 48 minutes more when Jefferson is on the court (116 points per 48) than when he is off it (103.9 points per game). One reason for this is because opposing centers have an eFG% (which factors in three-pointers, not generally applicable to centers and power forwards) of 56.3%. By contrast, the power forwards Jefferson guarded had an eFG% of 40.3%. Unfortunately, the sample size for Jefferson at the 4 is woefully small, so we don’t know if that excellent D on eFG% would hold up; but we do know his inept defense in the pivot, where he played exponentially more minutes, overwhelms that performance. And we know that even a scorer as gifted as Big Al isn’t going to lead his team to many victories if that team is ceding 116 points per game.

     

    On to Ryan Gomes. Whereas Jefferson had a huge disparity between his minutes at center and those at power forward, Gomes, because he went to small forward not only when a center was slotted in beside Jefferson, but when Craig Smith or Antoine Walker entered the game, is shown to have played 26% of his team’s minutes at small forward and 34% of the Wolves’ time at power forward (meaning he was on the court approximately 60% of the time). Thus, his stats between the two positions are a little more reliable in comparison to each other. And again according to 82games.com, Gomes yielded an eFG% of 48.6% to the small forwards he guarded versus 54.7% to the power forwards he guarded. (His own eFG% was better at power forward–49.7% versus 48.5% at the 3–but not enough to overcome the disparity of his less effective D in the low block.)

     

    Fortunately, McHale understands this. When I asked him at last week’s press conference: "Are you comfortable, long term with Jefferson at center and Gomes at the 4?" here is what he said.

    "Well I don’t think, I think that Al is a 4-5, not a 5-4, and that Ryan is a power 3-4. Ryan gets more shots at the 4 because he can move around and all those big guys have that paint fixation. But he rebounds better at the 3, posts up better at the 3. They give you flexibility and that is a good thing. Do I want to see that 4-5 combination for 48 minutes? No. I would like to have another big guy for when Al plays the 4. Al has got to get better defensively. Randy Foye has got to get better defensively, Rashad McCants has got to get better defensively, Ryan Gomes, all those guys have to get better defensively. I like the versatility that they give you and again that is why I like bigger players that can do different things. To me Gomes may have scored more at that 4 spot, but to me he punished teams more when he was offensively rebounding and going into the post at the 3. I like that style of play. But he can play both."

     

    When I pointed out that the vast bulk of minutes wound up with Al playing center and Gomes playing power forward, McHale acknowledged: "For 25-30 games, yeah. And I thought we fell into that. They are both two-position players which are really good to have. [But] you don’t like Ryan Gomes, who works really hard, against Rasheed Wallace. What you really like him playing 4 is against Luis Scola who is sitting in the paint. But what I like is you can make one substitution and go huge or one substitution and go small."

     

    Compounding the problem is the fact that the Wolves play horrible perimeter defense, and have for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t quite as deadly when Kevin Garnett was the superstar in residence, and totally committed to the defensive end. (KG’s willpower slipped the last two seasons he was in Minnesota. I thought it was age until I saw him this season in Boston, reborn as a panther capable of hounding anyone from the three point arc to the low block.)

     

    The third and final question I asked McHale was: "For some reason perimeter defense has been a chronic defect of this franchise. Why has that happened?" His reply was: "It bothers me too. It bothered me for twelve years. For me it goes back to 7th grade basketball: If you can’t keep your man in front of you, I’m going to take you out. Don’t let him cut in front of you and keep your rear end between him and the rim. That’s as tricky as I like to make it and sometimes I think we scheme up so much we got so many schemes going on that we lose sight of that. We have got to get better at that, at containing the ball. The good teams in our league defensively contain the ball. They may have holes in other areas but they contain the ball…That is a definite, huge area of concern that we have got to work on."

    To me, that in a nutshell is why the Wolves only won 22 games this season: They played an undersized lineup where the center and power forward couldn;t effectively defend their counterpart, and they allowed perimeter players to penetrate into the paint almost at will.

  • There Is No Bottom. There Is Simply —Or Not So Simply— the End

    There is another kind of sleep,

    We are talking in it now.

    As children we walked in it, a mile to school,

    And dreamed we dreamed we dreamed.

    —James Galvin, from "Hematite Lake"

    Maris Gomes was very young when he went to sea for the first time, and not much older –still much too young– when the boat on which he was working was capsized in a storm and he swallowed seawater and rolled for hours slowly toward the ocean floor.

    He remembered next to nothing about the moments and hours after he was thrown into the cold ocean. He wasn’t even sure; he may have jumped; he may have had no choice. His last clear memory of the experience was of watching one of his shipmates, a boy not much older than himself named Scruggs Colvin, clinging to some piece of debris from the wreck and drifting out of view, his shouts quickly swallowed up by the darkness and driving rain.

    Maris had been surprised to discover that there were angels in the ocean, living in the ruins of an old shipwreck out of which they had constructed a sort of cathedral of light.

    When the angels first came for him –there were five of them, all young and more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen– Maris had assumed they were mermaids. After a moment, though, there was no mistaking what they were: they had wings, and their flowing hair was haloed with pulsing light. They also had bare feet, and when they kicked their feet the bubbles they created were infused with golden light as well.

    In the time that followed –and Maris had no idea how long it might have been– he was given to understand that the human soul would perish in salt water; it could not escape a drowned body, and the job of the underwater angels was to ferry these drowned souls to the surface for release.

    Among those living in the ruins of the shipwreck there was one very young and inexperienced angel named Doon, and this angel fell immediately in love with Maris, and he with her. This sort of thing was not only discouraged, of course, but was strictly forbidden. Doon was headstrong, however, and in every translucent fiber of her being she was convinced that she and Maris had lived together in a long-ago forest and were fated to spend eternity at the bottom of the sea.

    For his part, Maris regarded Doon as the loveliest creature he had ever seen.

    Doon implored the other angels to allow Maris to stay with her, yet they remained insistent that she release him and let them take his soul to the surface so it could begin its rightful journey. This Doon stubbornly refused to do –in her brief life on earth she had known no great love– and she somehow managed to spirit away a fully compliant Maris to another shipwreck, where together they hid from the other angels and did nothing but hold each other –their bodies tangled like the braid of a parade horse’s tail– and tell stories.

    Doon told Maris she was not so keen on Heaven. "There are no thunderstorms," she said. "No mice. No tears of joy or sorrow. Angels feel only the small, tsk-tsking pity of those who have found safe haven in God’s arms. Heaven sometimes seems smug to me, and I miss being dirty. It is not as beautiful, sad, and various as the world."

    The lovers, alas, were soon enough discovered, and for her disobedience Doon was recalled straightaway to Heaven.

    And it was only then, as he was wrenched from his beloved, that Maris Gomes finally and truly drowned.

    By this point, and much to the satisfaction of the other angels, his soul was deemed beyond retrieval.

  • The Three Pointer: A "W" With Character

    Copyright 2008 NBAE (Photo by David Sherman/NBAE via Getty Images)

    Game #43, Home Game #20: New Jersey 95, Minnesota 98

    Season record: 8-35

    1. Carried By Jefferson

    For three quarters tonight, the Timberwolves were more of a one-man team than in any competitive game they have played this season. Al Jefferson had 33 points, more than half of the Wolves’ team total of 64. Rashad McCants was the only other Timberwolf in double figures, with 13, Jefferson had 13 rebounds, nearly half the team’s 27, with Ryan Gomes second with 4. Jefferson had gone to the free throw line a dozen times, making 9. No one else on the team had visited the charity stripe.

    Yet heading into that fourth quarter, Minnesota was down by double-digits, 74-64. Jefferson was obviously dominant; just as obviously, productive complements were hard to come by.

    In that final, game-changing period, however, the Wolves’ reared up and outscored New Jersey 34-21 to steal this game. What’s more, the theft was legit–this was the fifth straight quality game for Randy Wittman’s ballclub, and the Nets came into the Target Center already having lost eight in a row. Minnesota claimed this W the "right" way: With grit and ingenuity, and confidence, the ingredients of character and resilience. A new dynamic took hold: Jefferson scored only 7 of those 34 points, and made only 1 of the 8 field goals of that period. After scoring 31 points in the game’s first 36 minutes, the non-Jeffersons racked up 27 in the final 12.

    We’ll get to those vital contributions in a moment. This first point appropriately belongs to Jefferson. Five times tonight Big Al muscled the ball through the hoop while being fouled in the paint. Every single time he nailed the free throw to complete the three-point play. Only four of his 13 baskets were jumpers; two were tip-ins and 7 were lay-ups. A whopping 19 of his career high (and Wolves’ season high) 40 points were a direct result of his 8 offensive rebounds. In other words, on his on, Jefferson registered five treys and 19 second-chance points.

    True to form, he started badly on defense. His failure to box out led to an easy Richard Jefferson putback, then good-looking rookie Sean Williams slammed home a pair of dunks in which Big Al was a step slow. Teammate Rashad McCants picked up his second foul and went to the bench just 2:37 into the game covering up what appeared to be another blown Jefferson assignment.

    But even here, Jefferson’s game showed steady improvement. It helped that Williams, while incredibly talented, is still raw; that Josh Boone boasts the skills of a certified journeyman; and that Jason Collins doesn’t look to shoot. Nevertheless, Jefferson became increasingly active as the game went along, both is bodying up his man down low, rotating over in the paint, and deterring penetration (his pick and roll defense is still suspect). Throw in a couple of blocks, a steal and three big assists, and you’ve got an all-star caliber performance. They haven’t been as frequent as Wolves’ boosters claim, which is all the more reason to celebrate the ones that do occur.

    2. Anatomy Of A Comeback

    One of the key turning points in this game actually occurred just four minutes into the second half. Tired of watching McCants get roasted by New Jersey’s Richard Jefferson, Wittman used the occasion of Marko Jaric’s fourth foul to go with a larger lineup, subbing in Craig Smith for Jaric, a move that slid Ryan Gomes down to small forward to guard Jefferson and McCants down to shooting guard to cover Vince Carter. At the time, Richard Jefferson had 27 points in 18 minutes of action, including 10-14 FG. He scored just a single point (0-3FG, 1-2FT) the rest of the third quarter. Gomes’s entire third quarter line looks like this: one foul in 10:28. And yet he was plus +4, devoting himself to shutting down New Jersey’s biggest threat. The ability of the Wolves to negate one Jefferson while the Nets couldn’t negate another Jefferson played a centra role in this comeback.

    Meanwhile, freed of getting schooled by Jefferson and with Vince Carter now guarding him, McCants immediately erupted for 7 points in the first 1:27 after Wittman changed the lineup. The Wolves hacked a double-digit deficit down to 2 with 4:30 left to go in the third before Jason Kidd temporarily filled the void left by Richard Jefferson being shut down, nailing three treys in the next 2:44 (nearly the entire amount of his 11 point game) to boost the lead back to ten heading into the final quarter.

    No matter: The tone had been set. Jefferson went 1-8 FG for the game after Wittman went big. And on offense, the kamikaze 34 point final period was sparked by a pair of differently-styled swingmen, Corey Brewer and Gerald Green. I have ripped on the latter more than a little, but with the possible exception of the Indiana game, this is the best he’s looked in terms of his all-around contribution to a victory thus far this year. You expect two treys every now and then from the offensively volatile GG. The bonus here was a pair of steals from someone who has been a perpetually befuddled defender, not to mention some tenacious on-ball coverage of both Jefferson and Carter. Wittman often goes to a zone to protect against Green’s lapses on D. But when Gomes came in for GG with 5:04 to play, Green’s performance at both ends of the court had helped whittle a 13-point deficit down to 6 in less than six minutes’ time.

    Brewer likewise had something to do with that surge, while delivering his second impressive game in a row–especially in the 4th quarter. The comparison to last year’s top draft pick–"4th quarter Foye"–is apt in that, even in light of his disastrous 5-second out of bounds violation against Boston, Brewer is not rattled by crunchtime pressure. On the contrary: Like Foye, playing in a tight game down the homestretch seems to trigger confident memories of his successful college program, and his leadership role in it. Playing against a squad renowned for a lightning-quick trio now past their primes–Jefferson-Kidd-Carter–Brewer simply outhustled everyone on the floor; snatching offensive rebounds and twice flying down the court in transition fast enough that New Jersey had no choice but to foul him. On a night when Vince Carter frequently burned him on high pick-and-roll jumpers, it was Brewer’s offense that redeemed him, specifically three offensive rebounds and 6-6 FT that gave him a team-high 8 points in the final period. He also led the way in terms of raw passion, thrusting his fist out in triumph after getting fouled or when rugged scrums he helped initiate enabled the Wolves to secure another possession on the ball going out of bounds.

    Yet despite the heroics of Green and Brewer, the Wolves were still down 7 with 1:19 to play. *This* is where the character showed, where a callow team finally gelling after nearly three solid months of embarrassing ineptitude snatched the game from a group of desultory vets who weren’t very determined to halt their long losing streak.

    McCants hit his 4th trey of the game from the left side of the arc, making it 95-91 with 1:15 to go. Then something remarkable happened: Jason Kidd made a stupid decision. After Richard Jefferson had cooled off, the Nets’ bread-and-butter offense in the second half had been the high pick and roll with Kidd, dishing to Carter who would work the play with a big man. Needing just another bucket to likely seal the win, the Nets logically looked to be setting up the same play as Kidd dribbled to his right. But suddenly Kidd reversed field away from the pick and roll confluence and zipped a pass beneath the hoop to the relatively open center Jason Collins. But Collins wasn’t so open that he couldn’t be fouled by Al Jefferson, which is exactly what happened. And coming into the game, Collins had converted just
    10 of 30 free throws–he was the Wolves’ equivalent of Mad Dog Madsen. Not too surprisingly, he bricked both free throws with 56 seconds left to play.

    On the ensuring play, Sebastian Telfair kept his cool, refused to pick up his dribble against pressure, and found an open Gomes standing in the corner. Gomes, who had shot a putrid 9-41 from outside the arc over his past 16 games, let it fly….swish. It was now 95-94 with 40 seconds to go. Vince Carter then clanks a too-long jumper on a stilted possession for New Jersey and the Wolves rebound with 21 seconds to go. Witt calls timeout and inserts McCants in for Brewer as part of the offensive-defensive platoon he’s running between the two as much as circumstances permit. Shaddy decides he’ll be the man, but his jumper is a tad long time–only to be corralled off the carom by Al Jefferson–remember him?–he gets fouled before he has a chance to go back up. In the classic crunchtime free throw situation–down 1, two shots, 11 seconds to play–Jefferson doesn’t flinch, sinking his 18th and 19th second chance points of the game to put the Wolves in the lead for the first time since the first 90 seconds of the game.

    Last gasp for New Jersey. Richard Jefferson gets position but his six-foot jumper on the baseline hits the front iron and doesn’t creep over. Al Jefferson grabs his 19th rebound of the game, the Nets foul and Al cinches it with two more free throws to register his first-ever 40 point game.

    3. Cause For Optimism

    Foye and Ratliff are on the mend. Brewer, Jefferson and Telfair are all playing with enormous confidence. After a home-and-home with the underachieving Bulls (I’ll do my next trey on both of them together on Thursday), the Wolves play nine of the next ten games at home.